More On The $1 Trillion State Pension Crisis

After we discussed two weeks ago the utter mess of the New York State Public Pension Funds, it seems finally more and more people are starting to focus on this issue truly important issue. Bloomberg today is out with an "exclusive" discussing the up to $1.5 trillion potential bailout to make sure public workers and retirees health and penions funds' do not go up in smoke as the market is dead set on hitting 0 or bust. Bloomberg notes:

The misleading numbers posted by retirement fund administrators help mask [the] reality: Public pensions in the U.S. had total liabilities of $2.9 trillion as of Dec. 16, according to the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. Their total assets are about 30 percent less than that, at $2 trillion.

With stock market losses this year, public pensions in the U.S. are now underfunded by more than $1 trillion.

As we have noted previously, this is without doubt among the most pressings issues for the administration (after figuring out how to prevent everything from collapsing into the spreading AIG singularity) that has long gone far too unnoticed. We recommend reading this rather lenghty piece to see just how huge of a risk the pension underfunding is and is guaranteed to become.